Each week, Brian Grubb and Keith Phipps will attempt to unpack the latest episode of the HBO series Westworld, a show about an amusement park populated by lifelike robots that’s also about… other stuff.

The Horrible Truth About Bernard

Keith: This week starts with Bernard waking up, which seems fitting given how last week’s episode ended. He begins the episode in pain over what he did to Theresa and he ends it having lost that pain, its erasure his reward for doing Ford’s dirty work. It’s a contrast to what we learn about Maeve and her own resistance to having her memories wiped (more on that below). But I’m not sure Bernard would be so quick to surrender that if he thought it was gone forever. When he asks Ford if he’s been made to hurt others before, does he know the answer before he flashes on Elsie? I think something deeper’s going on here. Also, R.I.P. Elsie? She’s gone, right? She’ll be missed if so.

Brian: A few things:

– Ford tries to justify the backstory he gave Bernard by saying the pain gives him heart and heart makes him more “real,” but the biggest thing I took away from it all was how cruel it was, and how flippant Ford was about it. He created a robot to serve as his number two and he gave the robot a tragic story about a dead child that the robot has to live with forever under the impression that it’s real.

– Does Bernard, like, age? None of the other hosts appear to. Seems like it would come up after a few years at the company. “Happy birthday, Bernard. How old are you?” “87.” “Wow. You look… good.”

– The Elsie memory flash is interesting because it means at least two things: One, that Bernard has been Ford’s assassin before, and could have any number of bodies on his list. And two, that if he killed or kidnapped Elsie — this “vacation” story is a very thin and temporary cover, and makes me think Ford could be whipping up a Robot Elsie to take her place — and Ford “wiped” his memory, then Bernard could possibly remember Theresa, too. Both their relationship and the murder.

– Stubbs knows!

– It was very weird that Ford and Charlotte had their passive aggressive argument about the Clementine ruse and Bernard’s reinstatement while standing over Theresa’s dead body. Like, dang. Step out into the hallway for a sec. Also, shouldn’t someone have called the police? Because it seemed like they just had a butcher for the hosts do an autopsy on a human who died under mysterious circumstances and then everyone moved very quickly to “Now, about Bernard…”

– Hale and Lee the Writer are up to something with Dolores’ old malfunctioning dad and yet all I can think about it how much Lee sounds like Jimmy from You’re the Worst and how much I now wish Jimmy had been hired to write a narrative.

Yeah that whole thing, just hoo boy. Like, Edward Snowden had to go to some real extreme steps to hide his tracks and he was just smuggling PowerPoints out of the NSA. Amazon employees have security checks coming in and out of warehouses.

But it’s ok these guys are just strollin’ around with a souped-up robot nbd.

“Even at a 14, you were never a match for me.” She says that to him, and obviously there are plenty of parallels in this series (hell, it’s a main theme) about how human consciousness isn’t any different than the advanced AI of these machines…but it seemed like an odd thing to evaluate his cognitive score numerically like that, a callback to the scene where she’s having Felix “up” her stats.

i suspect I’m alone in this, but I find Maeve’s story the least compelling. Maybe it’s because it’s just them sitting in a room arguing, which gives my mind enough time to think of all the things wrong with that storyline (cameras? Monitors? Arguments in clear rooms? why not just dumb her down and move on? What code could possibly let her do what she does with the other hosts?). Incredibly, I care much more about what happens in Westworld than what happens in the “real world”.

You aren’t alone. Her storyline is absurd because originally they had cameras on all the hosts and now there’s no cameras or recordings anywhere and she can get away with whatever she wants…in or out of the park. it’s just poor writing.

For the record, this article format sucks. I don’t want to eavesdrop on a few guys talking about a show I watched, I want to see well thought out and presented things I might have missed. Sorry about that.

Bernard has moved into the oh-who-cares column; Ford will let nothing come to him, let no revelations take or stick, he’ll be muscle on the verge of discovery until he’s outlived his usefullness.

Maeve is too good to be true and can not make it out of this season alive. Her realizations have been too many to keep coming at that pace, and now that she’s tied in to Ford AND EdHarris’s backstories, she’ll have to go. I imagine she’ll get to see her child again, who will have no memory of her of course, and take a few people with her, but I can’t imagine her breasts going into season 2. She’s the nakedest actress on tv right now.

Dolores, her man, her insanity and her mans co-worker. This slow burn won’t catch fire until the last moment; one of these guys probably dies (probably the dick).

Wyatt and the new narrative: when these guys came out of the dark at the end they had this look about them like someone said “grab anything black and ‘scary’ you have at home and just wear that shit.'”. The black fur and horns? Horns? Is the new narrative Vikings? Is it Dark Souls 4? It feels very “lets figure this out next year if we get renewed.”

Ed Harris became truly less interesting via his backstory which I hope is bullshit. He went from supernatural badass to clueless grandpa in three episodes.

Hiring that faux British twat to replace her top-secret confident in sneaking data out of the park was weak. But the Island demanded a sacrafice so.

Still the show is superb, Hopkins is still legitimately menacing at his age. I think the finale will be bloody and feature all cliff-hangery.

I miss the True Detective days and wish these Monday write ups elicited even a fraction of the attention the daily Uproxxes Trump fear pieces seem to trigger. Oh well, fear is the new tv I guess.

I cannot really imagine interest in the show being high for a second season given how convulted the plot has gotten in just addressing simple questions at the expense of keeping viewers guessing. I think the issue for this show is that the theories out there has created expectations that really appears impossible to meet in terms of satisfying the audience while also gauging excitement for another dive with a new season.

A lot of people don’t need a coherent story and are fine with a bunch of unanswered questions and puzzles. It doesn’t do it for me and seems lazy and pointless, but you see how viewers spend hours making up their own narrative and trying to figure out what is going on. So I guess good for them, but the show is a joke at this point to me.

One thing I find intriguing is that Dolores is having these flash backs and code malfunctions in the timeline with William, and yet, she seems (mostly) fine and generally all cleaned up with the storyline when the MiB comes calling: a theoretically later time line. She must have one heck of an “no-trade clause” to not be taken out of commission, and must have gone through a serious wipe-down to go from the “What Time Am I In / are you real” status, to the generic love interest of Teddy. Perhaps once William rose to a higher office in the company, he could have forced her reinstatement to suffer over and over again (as it looks like she is set up to scorn him, perhaps in part turning him into the MiB)…There is definitely a puzzle piece or two missing here that will be excited to watch.

I think that ties into Arnold having “almost taken this place with him, but he didn’t thanks to me” line from the MiB earlier in the season.

The hosts are starting to malfunction, and William and Dolores’ quest will stop it, at least for a time. Cut to 30 years later, and the MiB is now trying to find the center of the maze, and maybe not so interested in saving the park this time.

I am getting the feeling that the Arnold messing with the hosts is really Ford. Either he has created his own Arnold that is waking up the hosts under Ford’s direction, or Ford is just doing it and making everyone think it’s Arnold. Don’t know why – but I can’t kick the feeling.

There is a movie called “My Darling Clementine”, about the shootout at the OK Corral, directed by John Ford. Wyatt Earp is the town marshal. There is a “Billy” a, “Clementine, a Wyatt, and it’s directed by a Ford. It was described as “the roaring west at it’s reckless best”. It also has a character that frequently quotes Shakespeare and, of course, ends with the violent shootout. Maybe a hint on how this will end.

Yes the show is going downhill with each episode and the only people watching at this point are interested in puzzles and not by the actual narrative content of the show. Because too many plot holes and contrivances now.